"Major Events with Alternate Histories": An Interview with Anne Valente

Anne Valente is the author if the recently released short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, and the fiction chapbook, An Elegy for Mathematics. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in One Story, Ninth Letter, Hayden's Ferry Review, and The Normal School, and her essays appear in The Believer and The Washington Post.

Her story, "The Great Flood," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Anne Valente talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about St. Louis, mythology, and writing a character's mindset.

Please tell us about the origins of your story “The Great Flood.” What sparked the initial idea behind it?

I’ve been working on a collection of short stories about the city of St. Louis, which is where I’m from. I’ve researched some of the city’s pivotal moments as well as some of the stranger facets of its history and culture, and I’ve been drawn to rewriting major events with alternate histories. The Flood of 1993 occurred when I was in elementary school and I remember the water creeping up the riverfront steps toward the Arch, as well as the boil orders and sandbagging and devastation of homes and farms along the Mississippi River. I was researching the history of the St. Louis Zoo around the same time that I was looking into the 1993 flood, and it clicked to combine these elements of St. Louis history and culture into one story. I also read about a man from Quincy, Illinois, who was convicted for purposefully removing sandbags from a levee in order to strand his wife on the other side of the river. The idea of a character tampering with a flood wall developed from there.

What drove the decision to put your story in conversation with the familiar tale of Noah’s Ark by using references to and quotes from the Bible? How and why do religion and mythology intersect with your fiction?

Mythology plays a larger role than religion in my work. I’m often interested in tales and fables and the stories we tell ourselves about the world, which seems an apt way of thinking about the central figure in this story and what kind of narrative he’s constructed about the city around him. In all honesty, I know very little about religion; I read the Bible for the first time in college, and only select passages. Noah’s Ark came into the story as a means of linking the flood to the animals at the St. Louis Zoo, two disparate aspects of St. Louis culture and history that I looked for a way to connect. I had to do some research into the Ark, including reading that section of the Bible in addition to others. My guess is that I took a fair number of Bible quotes well out of their original context and intent. 

The main character of your story seems deluded and irrational, yet he remains a sympathetic protagonist. What did you have to do in order to tap into this character’s headspace? How did you ensure that the reader would willingly follow him on his journey despite his skewed view of the world and his place in it?

I honestly didn’t know if the reader would follow him on his journey, especially since it’s such a claustrophobic one; he has no social interactions, no dialogue, only his tightly bound worldview and memories. With that said, I hoped that this sharp degree of narrowness would allow for the reader to recognize the limitations of his perspective while also in some way understanding it. He has experienced significant loss. He is a character in pain and in tremendous grief. The world has devastated him, the animals his only refuge. I hesitated to even give him a name, and to separate him any further from the reader and from the animals. I hope this pain makes him sympathetic enough for the reader to journey down to the floodwall with him and understand why he might take a chisel to it, why he might break it apart.

Describe your revision process for this story. How much did it change from the first draft to the final? Did you have to make any tough decisions?

I revised this story considerably between its first draft and the draft that was accepted for publication. Even then, I revised it further beneath Gabriel Blackwell’s sharp editorial eye. This was a tough story for me, in large part because it’s so closed in. Not a lot happens. We’re inside a limited, narrow perspective from start to finish. It’s a story of headspace and psychology far more than a story of plot. But even still, I needed to establish forward momentum somehow and my revisions focused largely on finding ways to further the story without adding actions or events that felt outside of this character’s world. I had to delete scenes. I moved so many other scenes around. This was the first time I’d done that so extensively in a single piece, since chronology matters far less in this story than the progression of a stagnant mindset.

What writing projects are you working on now?

I’m continuing to work on other stories about St. Louis. I’ve finished a few others in the past few months – one about Forest Park and ornithology, one about the desegregation program between St. Louis city and county public schools – and I hope to turn my attention next to the Budweiser Clydesdales and Busch Stadium. I’ve also recently finished a novel manuscript.

What have you read recently that you would like to recommend?

I’m currently reading Diane Cook’s debut collection, Man V. Nature, which is fantastic. Though I know I’m a latecomer to her work, I also recently finished Anne Carson’s Nox, which was gorgeous and devastating. Up next on my nightstand are two books I’ve been excited to read for months: Haruki Murakami’s latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and Matthew Gavin Frank’s Preparing the Ghost. 

"It Is the Escaped Couple's Mischief": An Interview with Patrick Rosal

Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently Boneshepherds, named a notable book by the National Book Critics Circle and the Academy of American Poets. A former Fulbright fellow, he has also won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award and the Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award. His poems and essays have appeared in Grantland, Tin House, Harvard Review, Language For a New Century, Best American Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He is a founding co-editor of Some Call It Ballin’, a sports quarterly, and teaches on the faculty of Rutgers University-Camden's MFA program.

His poems, "An Essay on Love," "Ode To Not Having Enough Kids To Play a Game of Baseball," "A Meditation on Water Beginning With Men Fishing a Flooded Avenue," and "Despedida: Quezon City," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, he talks with interviewer Christina Oddo about the origin of the content, the play between the lovers under oppression, and the mystery that exudes from the work.

What was your thought process behind the narrative structure of this work?

I was asked to read a poem at a very dear friend’s wedding and I was all ready to go with something, but then I thought to myself, what if I tried to write something. So, the morning of the wedding I got to it and this story—or a version of it—came out. It’s completely playful and so are the lovers, but it’s under the specter of an oppressive regime. Despite the tyranny, the lovers dream and play. The end is mysterious. We can’t tell if the old woman is telling the truth or not. We suspect that she saved their lives. She’s the trickster, the mischief maker, the babaylan who works, in this instance, on the side of joy.

Maybe the whole thing is overly romantic. That’s ok by me. But I was delighted to discover two people, presumably young, who defy the capricious restrictions of their government; I’m not one of the lovers, I’m one of the townspeople who has forgotten his own joy, his own romance, his own inclination toward the wild, and hearing all that laughter was a reminder to the townspeople (and to me) of the possibilities of living in a difficult time and place. I wanted to write a story with a little bit of love, a little affection, a little politics, and a little bit of mystery and magic.

How does the repetition of words and character actions push the themes present?

I think it’s a device of fables and maybe it’s a device used in storytelling in general. You have characters who do the same thing repeatedly or a series of things. I imagine it’s the same as anything in poetry. One sets up a pattern so that it can be broken. In this case, it was inevitable that the sentries would come and look for them. The repetition of the tasks, for me, did two things: it allowed me to give space for the lovers to dream and for them to play. It’s also fun for me as a writer because I like the whole spectrum of rhetoric that runs between litotes and hyperbole.

What prompted the idea of the “magnificent land?”

That’s the couple’s trouble, isn’t it. This fictional government is pretty simple-minded but extremely powerful. They can build marvels, yet it obsesses over its own power and uses it to enforce these capricious laws. Calling the land magnificent echoes fairy tales, of course. But it’s also ironic because we soon discover the stupid ordinances the government has put in place.

What are you currently reading?

I’m reading architect Christopher Alexander’s two volumes A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Being. I’m teaching a course on poetic forms that’s a pretty rigorous boot camp on prosody that tries to connect strange forms like Patchen’s graffiti poems and Afaa Michael Weaver’s Bop to traditions and treasons of conventional forms. Alexander’s books are all about how to design a living space that can be replicated and varied, as I imagine a good poetic form might be replicated and changed.

What are you writing?

I just finished a new poetry manuscript called Brooklyn Antediluvian, throughout which the threads of race, gentrification, historical violence, the consequence of names/naming and environmental disaster from New York City to the Philippines are threaded together. It is part autobiographical lyric, part immigrant narrative, and part political fable. Also, I’ve got a collection of essays that’s all but finished. It’s a compendium of the criticism, sports writing, and personal essays I’ve written over the years on subjects ranging from weightlifting to pianos to multilingualism to boxing to Chinua Achebe to my father as an ex-priest, etc.

"When You Hit the Buried Center and Strike It": An Interview with Eric Tran

Eric Tran is the author of Affairs with Men in Suits (Backbone Press 2014). His work appears in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hobart, and elsewhere. He is a medical student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. For more, visit veryerictran.com.

His essay, "Portraits of Handwashing," appeared in Issue Sixty-One of The Collagist.

Here, Eric Tran talks with interviewer William Hoffacker about medical school, imitating great writers, and the hidden joy of hand washing.

Tell us about the origins of your essay, “Portraits of Handwashing.” What sparked the initial idea for this piece?

I had just finished my first year of medical school and thought a lot about terrifying things that had become unhidden—not the expected sexy infectious diseases, but things I’d overlooked: while listening to parents talk about a toddler’s runny nose, a pediatrician will silently run through a mental checklist in regards to the baby’s growth and cognitive skills to see if development’s healthy. Similarly, we wash our hands not to get rid of bacteria we pick up from sick patients, but to temporarily remove native bacteria, like staph and strep, that could cause problems in a different part of the body. But I also wanted to explore the surprising, hidden joy involved with that same process.

Your essay begins with the inscription, “after Bernard Cooper.” Can you shed some light on the connection between this author and your essay?

Our connection? Simple: he’s better than me. I don’t mean this facetiously: “The Fine Art of Sighing,” which I shamelessly (really: not an atom of shame) re-wrote, he writes lyrically, intimately, and narratively—I could spend my entire life trying to match him in any of these categories and still come up short. But he does it all simultaneously in a way that makes them stronger as a whole. And of on top of all that, while reading the essay, it was clear that he was queer without him ever making a single reference to such. So to say it again: our connection is that he is miles and miles ahead of me and this essay was a step towards him.

The essay consists of five brief, numbered sections, each a paragraph of no more than about a hundred words. How challenging was it to achieve this level of concision? Were the sections always as small as they are, or did you whittle them down over multiple drafts?

I’ve noticed a strange development in the way I talk: either I have an outpouring of sentences, where I’m trying to gather speed and mass to make my point, or I’m trying very hard to find the exact phrasing and direction. I can imagine it now: I look at the ceiling or at the ground and say words slowly to buy myself time. Writing the essay—which is to say reading it aloud—was the latter: clipped sentences and with big breaths of air to consider my next move. Was it challenging? I don’t know. It just seemed the only way.

I noticed a turn from the end of the first section onward, from a predominantly lyrical approach to a more memoiristic style. (Section One contains “You” and imperative statements, while the other four sections contain “I.”) How did you determine how you would arrange the order of the essay’s five pieces? What made you decide to start with a section that stands apart from the others?

I originally had this harebrained scheme to start tiny and move outwards: in order to understand my conclusions about something the reader would first have to know the memories I brought with me. But I’ve found that the most effective writing for me starts with the larger context and slowly moves towards more intimate spaces. It takes time to build that trust, but when you hit the buried center and strike it, the feeling vibrates back outwards, touching everything that came before it.

What writing projects are you working on now?

Strangely, my bread and butter is the long-form essay, though I’ve produced far more lyric essay and poetry. Right now, I’m trying to be faithful to a memoir about the year I spent traveling with bears (large, hairy gay men) through North and South Carolina to various events like conventions, pageants, and orgies—a kind of self-ethnography of a Californian transplanted into the South. But of course I’m straying a lot (my friend and I often say ‘cheat on your writing with other writing’) with poems about what I’m learning and/or resisting in school.

What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend?

God, everything. I call and text people too often to share a phrase or sentence that caught me by surprise. Last week, a lecture slide said that people with hemolytic anemia will just feel a sense of ‘impending doom,’ that something bad is about to happen.

In terms of books, House and Fire by Maria Hummel is devastating and gorgeous if you’ve ever been a parent, a child, a patient, or a health care provider, or, you know, a person. I’ve just started Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron, which is making me fall in love with books again in so many ways. When I’m working on specific projects I tend to re-read the works I’m trying to copy, so these days I’ll admit to pilfering from John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead and Rochelle Hurt’s The Rusted City.